Developer Commentary

I’m a huge movie fan and I buy a lot of DVDs (lately Blu-Rays). And one aspect of DVDs I’ve been totally fallen in love with is Audio Commentaries. Not all of them are good, but many of them are still worth listening to. And the better ones can offer you so much insight in many aspects of filmmaking, ranging from early conception, pre-production over production itself to post-production like editing, scoring or test-screenings. The wealth of information offered is invaluable to get a glimpse into the problems and challenges of making a movie.

So I was very excited when I saw that Valve had started creating audio commentaries for their games. The first introduction of the audio commentary system was on “Lost Coast” (you may remember, the small map with served as a tech-study for HDR), but after that Valve added audio commentaries to every subsequent game. Those (combined with some of the blogs dealing with the development of engines, maps or classes) have been hugely fascinating.

Compared to the tons of information available on the making of movies (even before DVD you had Making-Of featurettes on TV or reports in magazines) the thought processes forming a computer game and the process of creating it has been covered very scantly.So I found listening to the audio snippets very interesting and enlightening, offering a lot of insight in the development, the different approaches taken and the factors forming a final decision.

Just lately I’ve started going through the audio commentary of L4D, which again is a hugely informative experience. It’s just fascinating to hear how the game developed, what dead ends or wrong design choices were made and how repeated iterations led to the final product.

The same has certainly been true for TF2. By now a few of the comments have become obsolete or put into a different perspective by the ongoing class updates, but for the most part the various game developers offer very interesting and comprehensive insight what considerations led to specific design decisions.Sadly the commentaries are restricted to three maps (though many comments are not map-specific) and Valve has – so far – not added new commentaries since, which is a shame considering that the game has underwent a lot of changes during the last 2 years, justifying some additional commentaries. For one I would love to hear on Payload. I would like to learn something about the iterations of Pipeline (remember that the first image appeared as background on the scout update, showing it in a more dustbowl-like textures) and of course I would like to know at least some of the thought processes which went into some of the class updates.

If you haven’t listened to any Valve audio commentary before you should consider giving it a try. They are easily accessible from the main menu, can be navigated efficiently and they don’t take up that much time